Anyone who lives in San Leandro and has the lowest appreciation for good food, cannot but decry the state of our local restaurants. There are only a handful of acceptable restaurants in town, and none of them ever change their menu, which makes them boring on my book.

But after reading last week's San Leandro Times poll, it's no surprise that good restaurants avoid San Leandro like the plague. The SLT asked five random San Leandrans what their favorite restaurant in San Leandro was. The answers? Wendy's, McDonald's, some unnamed taqueria on East 14th, Los Pericos (which I like) and Tsuru Sushi (which I don't think much of). Yeah....

I'm also very sad to report that the old space occupied by Peewee's Pizza on East 14th by Estabrook (a stonethrow away from my house), has re-oped as a Papa Johns, a cheap pizzeria chain :-( Peewee's was no gourmet restaurant, but it was a cool place - a little dive that had been a family business for decades, and made quite good pizza. It had character, it was locally owned, we liked it. Alas, it burned down to the ground a few years ago and the owners did not have insurance. We kept the hope that they'd be able to get the money somehow and rebuild, but alas, it didn't happen.

What is even more pathetic is that we'll at least try Papa John's pizza.